


Lost Horizons

by Andraste



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-11-08 05:55:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20830502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andraste/pseuds/Andraste
Summary: Dagna and Harding have different ways of investigating the world, but some Inquisition missions require more than one skill set.





	Lost Horizons

It's hard not to notice Dagna. Even though she's the tiniest person in an organisation that has more than its share of dwarves, she manages to take up a lot of space. Lace only comes to Skyhold to collect supplies and new personnel, but she still hears all the crazy stories. They've never meet, though, until Dagna finds her in the tavern one day.

"Hello! You're Scout Harding, yes? Well, you must be, how many dwarf scouts do we have?"

"Seven, actually," Harding says. Of course, five of them are male and the other woman is a blonde, so people don't actually get her mixed up with them. Everyone knows she was first, anyway.

Dagna only pauses for a moment. "Wow. That's a lot more than I thought. I keep forgetting how big everything is getting!"

"To answer your question, though: yes, I am Harding. You must be Dagna."

Dagna smiles. "That's right. Still only one Arcanist in the whole Inquisition. In the whole of southern Thedas, probably. Anyway, I was wondering if you could help me with something?"

Even after hearing about the time Dagna almost burned down the stables, Lace can't help but be curious.

"Well, that depends. What do you need help with?"

"I need an archer, and everyone says you're the best. Well, along with Sera and Varric."

"Is there a reason you're asking me instead of them?" Varric was off to Val Royeux with Cadash the last time she saw him, but Sera is upstairs somewhere.

"Oh, Sera's great, but she won't let me go near her bow for some reason. As for Bianca, well, forget that. I'd have to prise her out of Varric's cold, dead hands and obviously I wouldn't be willing to kill him just to get hold of his crossbow ..." Dagna stops and coughs awkwardly. "Anyway, I really need someone who can hit a target on command, and since you're at Skyhold for once, I thought I'd ask."

"Of course. If it helps the Inquisition, I'd be happy to fire off a few arrows for you."

Dagna leads her down to the Undercroft. Lace hadn't actually had a reason to go down here before, and the light isn't the best for archery, but it doesn't look like the target will be far away. There's not a lot of room.

"See, I'm trying out new runes. There must be more we can do with them than just making arrows catch fire or freeze. If I'm right, this should make them hit harder."

Lace tests the unfamiliar bow that Dagna hands her. It's dwarf-sized, and she wonders how long this ambush has been planned. The lyrium inlay looks unfamiliar, but then, she doesn't know anything about runes. Her family was Merchant Caste before they turned surfacer.

"If you could just hit that target over there," Dagna says, "as close to the middle as possible? I want to see how far it goes in." She's got it hanging in front of what seems to be a sack of turnips. Lace wonders if the kitchen is going to miss those any time soon.

It's an easy shot. The arrow hits dead centre, and goes straight through and into the turnip sack - which would be perfect if it stopped there, rather than going straight through _that_ and then knocking over half a dozen vials of liquid sitting on the table behind it before it hits the Undercroft wall. That stops it, but not before a couple of bricks shatter under the impact. For a moment, there's a deathly silence. 

"Uh. I guess it worked?" she says. 

Dagna looks somewhere between dismayed and delighted. "Oh, boy. Harritt is _not_ going to be happy with me."

Lace peers up at the ceiling. "I hope that's not a load-bearing wall."

She's never completely relaxed under so much stone. Maybe dwarves from Orzammar really do have Stone sense, but she couldn't say that she'd ever experienced it.

"I wouldn't worry about that. I'm not sure what keeps Skyhold up, but I don't think it's actually the stonework. I believe it's some kind of magic we don't understand. I'd love to take a few walls out and test that theory, but Josephine said no."

Lace wonders whether Dagna has any idea exactly how alarming she is.

"Well, maybe Gatsi can fix the wall before anyone else notices. Do you want me to go and find him for you?" Dagna is peering intently at the arrow, but she turns around to smile at Lace.

"That would be so sweet of you! He's usually in the Great Hall if he's not out supervising a job, so if you could send him down that would be wonderful. Thank you so much for your help! I'm sure I just need to adjust the lyrium levels and give it a little less oomph ..."

"Well, let me know if you need help again when I'm here," Lace says. It's a crazy thing to say - what if the next bow explodes? - but she can't help feeling curious about what Dagna will do next.

"I'll let you know if I need anything!"

Gatsi just sighs and shakes his head when Lace explains what happened, and she gets the impression that he's been through this kind of thing before.

***

"Look, I know you've been to the Wastes. That's exactly my point - they're going to need somebody who knows the ground. And someone who might be able to stop Dagna blowing the place sky high somehow. I'd go and supervise her myself, but people keep giving me _paperwork_."

Lace would consider that a transparent excuse, but she knows that Inquisitor Cadash would strongly prefer treking through the Wastes pulling snakes out of her boots to actually staying here and running things. She leaves that to Leliana, Josephine and Cullen as much as possible, but since the world got saved, more and more dignitaries want to actually _talk_ to her.

Maybe it won't be so bad. A small Inquisition expedition with Dagna in charge of the science and Lace in charge of the field work, to take a closer look at the dwarven tombs. Simple enough mission, even if the territory is horrible. She hasn't seen much of Dagna since the Arcanist moved on from bows to hammers, but she's always interesting company.

"Do you think there's anything to find?"

"Well, to be honest, it's not like we looked that hard. Pretty much just scooped up the obvious treasure, fought the dragon then left. I'm sure Dagna will find something interesting that we missed. Besides, you must have scouted all of Ferelden and Orlais by now. Time to go back and scout harder!"

Lace sighs. "I just wish it wasn't the worst parts you wanted me to look at again. But as long as I get to pick the crew myself, I'm in."

The Inquisitor grins. "Of course. Just don't try and take Dorian. Or Varric. They'll kill me." 

***

It's a long ride to the Hissing Wastes, but Dagna somehow manages to talk the whole way. Not always to Lace - she chatters happily to the other Inquisition scouts, especially the formerly-apostate mage that Leliana arranged to have sent with them. According to Dagna, he has a completely different perspective on elemental magic to the Circle mages she's spoken to.

"You went to all the Circles?" Lace asks eventually. Dagna has travelled almost as much as she has, it seems.

"All the ones I could get to - there's a lot I never made it to before the mage rebellion started, and I never got as far as the Andefells or Rivain."

"Do you have an opinion on the mage rebellion?"

"I guess I do. It's weird, you know. Before I left Orzammar and went to the Circles, I imagined how wonderful they were. And they were! So much learning and scholarship. But once I noticed that I could come and go whenever I wanted and they couldn't - well, I can see how it happened. What about you?"

Most dwarves don't have much of a view on mages unless they're _really_ Andrastian, so Lace isn't used to being asked. "I just can't imagine how they all decided to leave their homes like that."

"I mean, isn't that what we're doing? It's what I've been doing for a decade now."

Lace shakes her head, but she can't explain to Dagna or herself why it feels different to her. Like her ancestors stepping out under the sky for the first time must have felt.

***

The ruins are deep in the desert, and they arrive barely before dawn on the seventeenth day of their trek into the blighted lands. They hardly have time to dig in before the sun gets them, and Lace is still helping Dagna with her tent pegs as it comes up. The woman is brilliant, but she can't put up a tent to save herself.

"You know, over the last year I've looked at most of it, and I have to say I think this is probably the worst place in the world. Why would anyone come here, let alone dwarves?"

"Remember, this was way before the Blight. It must have been beautiful once."

Maybe it's just because she's look at it through Dagna's eyes, but somehow the place doesn't seem so bad at night. The moon lends it all an eerie grandeur. The ruins aren't exactly pretty, but in the light of the rising sun they're sort of majestic.

"You think we'll find something important here?" The Inquisitor already transcribed all the inscriptions, and for many people that would have been enough. Not for Dagna, though, who had hung on every word that Varric and Dorian could report about the dwarven runes. Blackwall had just told them that the whole place was full of scorpions and advised everyone to keep well away.

“I think I have to see for myself what's down there, to make sure. Not that I don't trust the Inquisitor's notes, but she couldn't exactly spend all day digging around for pottery shards. There's bound to be something she missed.”

***

If she lives to be a hundred, Lace will never get rid of the smell of spiders. She didn't realise that spiders _had_ a smell, until she helped kill about a thousand of them while Dagna dug up ancient forks and went 'hmmmmm' a lot. 

Her back and shoulders ache from drawing her bow too many times, and after two days they haven't found much of anything.

“Hello? Harding?”

She rolls over with a groan and sits up on her bedroll. “Hey, Dagna, come in.” Even though it's hot, she was too tired to do more than pull her boots off.

Dagna sticks her head around the flap. “I was just wondering if you'd like a bath.”

“A bath?” Lace wouldn't be more surprised if Dagna had just invited her to a three-course banquet with Empress Celene and a talking Mabari. There are wells out here, but water is carefully rationed just to be safe.

“It was Auguste's idea. He actually found water and filled a bath for me!”

“Wait, he can _make_ water? Just like that?”

“Not exactly. There _is_ water here, it's just deep underground. He just had to pull it upwards.”

“That's – amazing. How come none of our other mages can do that?”

“It's an old trick he learned from the Apostate woman who tutored him. I don't think Circle mages would have a lot of use for a water finding spell. Especially since they always seem to put the Circles near water anyway. And I guess the Dalish don't spend much time in the desert.”

“A bath sounds incredible. But are you sure nobody else needs it more? Some of the other scouts smell pretty bad."

“There's enough water down there for everyone, we just have to take it in turns so that we don't wear Auguste out. Come on, you've earned second go. He even cooled it down with an ice spell!”

The thought of that much water is too much. She leaves her boots behind and follows Dagna back to her tent, guiltily sneaking past the other scouts.

***

The bath is blissfully cool. Lace reaches back to unbraid her hair and sinks her head under the water. It's impossible to imagine that she was hot thirty seconds ago, just as it's impossible to imagine that in just a few hours the air will be freezing. She'd better make sure to get her hair dry before then.

"You know," she says, "I don't care what anyone says. Magic isn't all bad."

Dagna giggles. "I think it would help a lot if people could see things like this."

"What, me in the bathtub?"

She laughs harder. "No, silly. I mean - magic just being used to make things better. I saw it in all of the Circles I visited. They'd use magic to warm up their soup, or light the candles. It doesn't have to be used to destroy things."

"You think we'll find the dwarves here had rune-powered hot water bottles?"

"Maybe! We'll go down into the mountain tomb tomorrow. Can't wait to see what we'll find down there."

***

As it turned out, what they found was mostly sand, bugs, and, oh, of course, more giant spiders. They seemed to crawl out of every corner of the tomb as Lace directed her fellow scouts and Dagna oohed and ahhed over the runic inscriptions. The long climb down into the darkness was one of her least favourite experiences since joining the Inquisition. Dark, full of spiders _and_ the risk of a long fall off a ladder.

Still, once they're down there and Auguste has lit up all the freaky torches, she starts to think that it's worth it. The Inquisitor wasn't kidding about the amount of stuff left to find - authentic dwarven relics are all around them, and Dagna spends a happy hour making a pile of them in the chamber closest to the ladder.

Lace has just finished fighting _another fucking spider_ when Dagna calls her over.

"I think there might be another chamber back here, behind all the sand. Somewhere the Inquisitor didn't find at all. Doubt the Venatori found it either - looks like the doorway fell in decades ago, at least."

"We'll have to get more people down here to dig it out," Lace says. "I just hope we brought enough shovels."

***

They can't bring the entire expedition down at once - somebody has to sit up top at all times and make sure they don't get ambushed by the remains of the Venatori or the Red Templars or anyone else that wants to kill Inquisition agents just on principle. So they work in shifts, trying not to come up to the surface more than absolutely necessary. It's a long climb up the ladders, so Harding has them start by digging a latrine trench in one of the rooms Dagna has declared uninteresting. Soon it smells worse than the dead spiders.

It takes them three days of careful digging and bracing to uncover what they assume will be another burial chamber. Except when they finally punch a tunnel through, that isn't what they find.

"I don't understand," Dagna says. In the half-light, she looks confused. "I was expecting another tomb. I don't know what this is."

To Lace's eyes, it looks like a big pile of junk. She settles herself down in the corner while Dagna starts to sort through it, and almost drifts off with her head resting on the cool stone doorway. Two of the other scouts are in the next chamber to watch for creepy-crawlies, but she let the others go back topside. It's kind of nice down here, when nothing is trying to kill you. Nicer than the desert, that's for sure. Maybe she understands a little better why her ancestors liked living underground. Eventually, a gasp from Dagna wakes her from her dozing.

"What did you find?"

"I think - I think this might be a golem."

"Is that even possible? Doesn't Fairel predate Carridin by centuries?"

"Yes, but there have always been rumours that he wasn't really the first to build golems. Ask Varric to tell you about his trip to the red lyrium thaig some time - that was lost centuries before Carridin, but it was full of them! Maybe this is finally proof that Carridin wasn't the first."

Lace didn't consider herself an expert on golems, but it certainly looked like one to her. As they gradually dug it out from under the pile of dust and rock, a distinctive humanoid shape was revealed.

"I can't say for sure until I examine it properly, but this does not look like one of Carridin's golems. I mean, the joints are completely different! I wonder if the Inquisitor can find us a golem expert?"

Lace has faith in the Inquisition's ability to find everything from elfroot to draconologists. She was sure that if any golem experts actually existed, Ambassador Montilyet would be able to find them somewhere. But to her, it seemed like there was a more pressing problem.

"Never mind that - how the heck do we get this thing out of here up the ladder?"

Dagna stops clearing away the dirt and rubble and looks thoughtful. "Oh, good point. We might be able to get everyone to carry it to the bottom of the shaft, but I guess we'll need a winch."

"Did we even bring that much rope? It looks heavy."

"Hmmmm. I wonder if -" Dagna stops clearing the rubble off the golem and went to look through the various junk they'd been moving earlier. "A-ha! Maybe this is it!"

She was holding a short length of crystal, dingy from centuries spent lying in a pile of junk. "Looks like it could be a control rod," Dagna said, "although I guess it won't do much good without the command phrase. We could try to find a dwarven linguist and have them trek all the way out here and recite their entire vocabulary of ancient dwarven at the thing ..."

"Wait a minute," Lace said. "Look at the front of the golem. Looks like the rod is meant to fit in there, right?"

"Yeah. I guess there's no reason this one has to work exactly like the ones Carridin built ..."

Lace was about to reach over and stop her, but of course Dagna was too quick for her. Without even hesitating, she thrust the control rod home into the opening.

As Lace took a cautious step backwards, it began to turn and make a grinding noise. Then the sound stopped, but a light took its place, first in the crystal and then spreading out from there to suffuse the entire golem with an eerie blue glow. Lace physically pulls Dagna away from it.

"Are you sure that was a good idea?" she says, through gritted teeth. She's already imagining what she's going to write in her report. What her deputy will write in the report if this thing goes berserk and kills them both. Assuming it doesn't then climb the ladder and kill everyone else, then go walking off into the desert.

"I wasn't expecting it to work!" Dagna says, sounding more excited than worried even now.

The golem sits up, sand and pebbles pouring off of it. It's eyeless head turns to face them, and it pauses. Expectantly, somehow, although it has no actual facial expression.

"Atrast urlak?"

The words come rumbling out of the golem, although it has no mouth. Lace pulls Dagna back another step.

"Please tell me that means 'hello' and not 'I'm going to crush your head now'," she says.

"The accent is weird," Dagna says, "but I think it's asking for instructions, maybe? Um - stand up?"

Lace doesn't speak more than a handful of phrases of dwarven, but she assumes that the next words Dagna says mean 'stand up' since the golem gets laboriously to its feet.

She puts a hand on the knife at her belt - no room to shoot in here, although the knife isn't any more likely to damage the thing than her bow is - and looks sideways at Dagna. "Maybe you should find out if you can switch it _off_ first?" she says.

"Val gara?" the golem says.

"Can you understand me?" Dagna says, clearly and slowly. The golem does nothing. Clearly the trade tongue that became common was invented some time after Fairel left Orzammar.

"So I guess we could use that dwarven linguist right about now?" she says.

"I guess so," Dagna says. "I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to get out of it by myself. I'm going to try, though!"

Lace sights and puts a hand to her forehead. Great. Now she has to assign people to watch for spiders, Venatori, Red Templars _and_ find someone with a really big hammer to stand here and watch this thing in case it's not friendly after all.

***

It turns out that Dagna can get more out of the golem than she thought, or at least she's not ready to give up trying without a fight. Lace barely sees her for three days, as Dagna spends most of her time in the hole talking to it. They still haven't figured out how to get it out of there - it's obviously too heavy for the ladder, and they're going to need to build a sturdy winch to get it up. Harding mostly supervises the building and lets Dagna get on with her work.

It's some ungodly hour of the morning on the fourth day when she's startled awake by the sound of someone falling over the equipment in the corner, and she sits up to find Danga cursing.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, fine - I was trying not to wake you up. Sorry. I think I left another light rune in here."

"Shouldn't you be getting some sleep?"

"I'm too wound up to sleep."

"You know, the golem isn't going anywhere. It's been there thousands of years, and we didn't even get the winch working yet."

"I know - it's just, I think it needs the company."

"What do you talk about?"

"Oh, mostly simple stuff. It's teaching me the alphabet, how to count, that kind of thing. I wish I'd paid more attention to my lessons back when I was a kid."

"I thought you'd enjoy that," Lace says, "but I get the feeling that you aren't."

"I just worry that I made a mistake waking it up."

"You think it's dangerous after all?"

"No, that's not what I meant. You know how Carridin made golems, right?"

Lace had heard the stories, anyway - from Gatsi, who had left Orzammar after he found out what Paragon Branka was doing with the Anvil of the Void. Dwarves, encased in metal bodies that lasted for centuries, their memories lost to time.

"This one was made the same way?"

"As far as I can tell. It doesn't remember much of anything from before it was shut down. It's just - sad. It's all alone and it doesn't even remember who it's missing. Isn't that the saddest thing you've ever heard?"

Lace has heard a lot of sad stories the last few years, ever since the sky opened up. Still, Dagna has a point.

"Maybe it's better off that way," she said. "Everyone it ever knew has been dead for thousands of years."

"I asked it about Fairel, about why it left its home and went with him, and it just said it wanted to learn."

"And you couldn't help thinking that you did the same thing, and wondering if you'd both made a mistake?"

"I know I was right to leave Orzammar, I just - do you ever think that _you_ did the wrong thing, leaving the Hinterlands?"

Lace shrugged. "Maybe I did, back when Corypheus was still alive - but the idea that I'll be able to say when I'm an old lady that I really helped to beat him ... that means a lot, doesn't it?"

"I guess I never thought about it like that."

"That's because you're always looking at the next road, and never at the end of the one you're on. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's not a bad thing. But maybe you should slow down once in a while and look at what you already achieved."

Dagna smiles at her. "I guess you make a good point. I like the way you look at things you know? It's different."

Lace finds herself blushing. "I would have said the same about you."

"Well, anyway," Dagna says, into the awkward silence. "I guess I didn't leave that light rune here after all. I'll have to go bother Auguste again."

***

After five days, they finally have the winch as prepared as its ever going to get. Lace is still worried it's going to break, which is why she makes everyone climb up the ladder to the surface before they start pulling the golem up, just in case. Falling might not even hurt it, but she's not going to have it squishing anyone else.

They do it at night so they don't have to work in the sun, so when the it finally steps out of the ruins, the stars are twinkling above.

It stands there, completely silent and still, staring up at the them, for so long that Lace thinks that it's broken. Then it turns and looks at Dagna and says something in its low rumbling voice.

Dagna dashes over to it and takes its hand, and it says the same thing again. Dagna replies, waving her arms in the air. They're clearly having an argument, although Lace isn't even picking up one word in ten.

"What's the problem?" she asks, walking over cautiously.

"It wants me to take out its control rod. To - dissemble it. I think it says that it just wanted to see the sky again."

She wonders what it was like for this dwarf, so long ago, when it saw the open sky for the first time. She wonders what it was like for Dagna, or her grandparents.

"Well, I don't think we can get it to move if it doesn't want to. Maybe we should at least take the rod out for now."

Dagna folds her hands, agonised. "I don't know if it will even work again a second time! The crystal is so fragile with age."

"Dagna, it really isn't your choice, is it?"

Dagna opens her mouth, closes it again. There are tears at the corner of her eyes, and Lace reaches over impulsively and gives her a hug. "I know you'll do the right thing," she says.

The golem, behind them, rumbles out another phrase Lace doesn't understand.

"Atrast vala," Dagna says to the golem, and even Lace knows that one. She reaches up and lifts the control crystal out of its socket.

***

They sacrifice the mage's pillow and pack the crystal in feathers. Dagna has high hopes about reactivating the golem when they get back to Skyhold. Lucky they brought a big wagon and strong horses to pull it.

"Part of me thinks that I should just smash it," Dagna says, "and never wake it up again."

"I think you should at least try to have it speak to Cadash first," Lace replies. "She's so good at talking people into things, I bet she charms it into staying awake."

Dagna visibly perks up. "That is true. Not that she had to work hard to talk me into joining."

"Me either," Lace says with a grin, "but some people take a bit more convincing to see the light."

"Thanks for talking me into doing the right thing back there," Dagna says. It's dark, and the stars shine on her hair.

"You would have made the same decision on your own," Lace says.

"I don't know if that's true. I sometimes forget to look at people while I'm looking at the cool magic stuff."

"But you want to use the cool magic stuff to help people. That makes all the difference."

Lace is more surprised that she should be when Dagna leans over and abruptly kisses her on the cheek. "And you want to always see the best in people, and that makes all the difference to me. Come on, let's go home."

They're both quieter than usual as they turn their ponies back in the direction of the Frostbacks, but it's a comfortable silence. Maybe she'll stay at Skyhold a little longer than usual this time around.


End file.
